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Libya's History Lesson Yet to Be Deciphered

LONDON — There is a moment in the lives of reinvented lands when their liberation becomes the founding legend, shaping the outlook of generations to come; when the heady moment of freedom offers the first chapter of a new national narrative.

The moment is not always undisputed, or even a reflection of reality. A nation’s myths may or may not endure in the face of historians’ challenges and revisions. Through the prism of received truth, a single event may accumulate multiple interpretations: think only of the liberation of Paris in 1944 claimed as much by Americans as by the French; or of the fall of Berlin a few months later. (Soviet heroism or Red Army barbarism?)

In the past, new leaders aspired to fix the moment of renewal in time, space and memory with a single, enduring image: Gen. Charles de Gaulle striding along the Champs-Élysées; Moscow’s troops lofting the red banner over the ruined Reichstag. But the era of cellphone videos and their viral dissemination on Twitter and YouTube denies the propagandists such simple hagiography.

Indeed the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — surely the founding moment of a new Libya — may have signaled a newer template, offering a much more ambiguous and flawed beginning to the iconography of Libya’s liberation.

Here, captured by mobile phone, is the “brother leader,” bloodied but alive, remonstrating with his captors, as recognizable in the ragged mantle of the fallen dictator as the disheveled Saddam Hussein emerging from his burrow of a hiding place in Iraq.

Here is a spokesman for Libya’s new leaders insisting that Colonel Qaddafi was caught in cross-fire when the images swirling through cyberspace suggest that he was killed by his enemies acting with the absolute authority and bloodlust of a lynch mob.

Here, finally, after 42 years of brutal, absolute, quirky and murderous power, is Colonel Qaddafi laid out to rot on a concrete floor in a meat locker in Misurata before his secret burial in the desert — a lying in state so gruesome that the Libyans who formed lines to see him had to wear face masks to filter the odor of putrefaction.

If that sequence of images inspires the first chapter of the post-Qaddafi era, then the new Libya will be founded on a legend not of the heroism of its liberators — the militias who resisted the onslaught of pro-Qaddafi forces — but of moral ambiguity and dubious authority, of recourse to untruth in the face of unpalatable evidence.

That impression seemed to deepen with reports from Human Rights Watch this week that the bodies of 53 pro-Qaddafi victims had been found in newly liberated Surt — Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown and final, vainglorious redoubt — in circumstances suggesting summary execution.

“This latest massacre seems part of a trend of killings, looting, and other abuses committed by armed anti-Qaddafi fighters who consider themselves above the law,” said Peter Bouckaert, a Human Rights Watch official.

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The same misgivings have been voiced by the representatives of Britain, France and other NATO allies whose air campaign turned back Colonel Qaddafi’s forces on the approaches to Benghazi in the early days of the uprising against his rule and went on to sustain the revolt.

Of course, there is a measure of cultural imperialism in the outsiders’ insistence on the adoption of their own moral code in lands — particularly in the Islamic world — where Western military force has molded events so graphically as they have done in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya (though not, significantly, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Syria, where strategic considerations seem to trump the moral imperative of shining freedom’s light into the dark corners of intolerance).

Indeed, even as the NATO air campaign unfolded, some among Colonel Qaddafi’s allies — in Africa and in Russia, in particular — argued that the alliance had far overstepped its formal mandate from the U.N. Security Council to protect civilian lives, but not to facilitate regime change.

If post-Qaddafi Libya’s founding narrative is ever subjected to a historian’s clarity, then it might be that NATO’s role in attacking and halting the convoy of vehicles in which Colonel Qaddafi apparently sought to flee last week — exposing him directly to the wrath of his foes — will be seen in much the same light as the spectacle of U.S. troops tearing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003.

Without NATO airstrikes, in other words, the ragtag army that took to the streets of Libyan cities last February would probably have faced a far more stubborn, enduring, uncertain and bloody battle to end the Qaddafi dictatorship. It might even have failed, as uprisings have seemed to falter elsewhere, in Bahrain, Syria and Yemen.

Few, if any, nations relish acknowledging the role of outsiders in ridding them of their foes. The passions unleashed by liberation are rarely clear-cut or free of score-settling and shame: consider the excesses of the French purges of suspected Nazi collaborators — the so-called Épuration — after the Second World War.

Such concerns do not seem to resonate among Libyans who are simply relieved that the fight has been won and their tormentor removed. Indeed, some reports from Tripoli suggest that the fighters accused of shooting Colonel Qaddafi through the head are national heroes.

It is hard to avoid the impression, moreover, that, in the murky worlds of intelligence agencies that first tracked Colonel Qaddafi as a sponsor of terrorism, then collaborated with him after his Pauline conversion to cooperation with the West less than a decade ago, there may have been relief that he was denied an opportunity to unburden himself of his manifold secrets.

“The sight of Qaddafi in the International Criminal Court would have been a powerful signal to bad rulers elsewhere,” Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Libya, wrote in The Independent on Sunday. “But drawing a line under the past so decisively may turn out to be more of a help than a hindrance to Libya’s progress now.”